Tech News Roundup for June 29, 2020
Today’s update will be very heavy on the politics and policies of technology and tech companies, as current event dictate some of the news.
Reddit, Twitch Become Latest Companies to Take Action Against Hate Speech
Reddit has banned several communities for continuous violation of the company’s policies. The most notable community to be banned is r/The_Donald. The Donald was not affiliated with President Donald Trump or his campaign, but was an online gathering place for some of his supporters, and frequently hosted content containing hate speech, racism, and targeted harassment. In the announcement of the ban, Reddit’s CEO admitted the community had violates the company’s terms of service for years.
It should be noted that another community that Reddit banned today was r/ChapoTrapHouse, which was a community that promoted far left hate speech and harassment.
Twitch, the streaming service owned by Amazon, also issued a temporary ban on the Trump Campaign’s official account, as well as removing some of the content on that page. The page serves as a streaming platform for the Trump rallies, and archived streams of those rallies are stored there. The stream that Twitch removed was a replay of one of Trump’s earliest campaign rallies, where he called Mexican People coming to the United States rapists.
Facebook Makes Small Concessions While the Advertising Boycott Grows
Facebook has announced small concessions to its content policy after some of the largest companies in the world announced they were joining the advertising boycott against the social media giant’s group of companies. Coca-Cola, PepsiCo, Starbucks and Denny’s announced they would be “pausing” advertising for at least 30 days.
Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced that the company would begin labelling content it determines violates it rules but chooses to leave up, as well as a separate prompt warning users that the content violates it rules if they attempt to share it. The company will not stop users from sharing the content, nor take it down, but it will be labelled as such. This is similar to the moves taken by Twitter, though that company has in some instances taken the step of restricting the sharing and visibility of some content.
Trump Campaign Scrambling to Find Ways to Reach Base as Companies Crack Down on Hateful Content
The Trump Campaign is in what internal sources call “Code Red” trying to find distribution platforms for the Trump Campaign that will not restrict its content. This has come as several companies, like Twitter, Snap Inc., Twitch, Reddit, and others begin enforcing rules against hate speech, racism, and other content deemed to be outside of the terms of service. The Trump Campaign is looking at smaller platforms that do not restrict this content, or starting its own platform. These platforms will allow the President to continue to use racist, incendiary remarks without being taken down, but will have far less reach to the mainstream audience.
It should be noted that Donald Trump has spoken out about Section 230, which is a portion of a US law that protects internet companies like Twitter and Facebook from legal liabilities for content posted on their platforms. As an example, if someone posts a racist comment on Twitter, Twitter is not liable for that comment. President Trump has said many times that the social media companies do not treat him fairly, and wants to revoke section 230 to both force companies to take action against that type of content, but also sue those companies, one of the President’s favourite tactics. It is unclear if the President realises that his wish to remove Section 230 would also result in even stricter moderation of content he posts that is often widely accepted to be racist, hateful, or potentially promoting violence.
Democratic Presidential candidate Joe Biden has also spoken out against Section 230, saying he would also like to make significant changes to it. It is also unclear if Biden fully understands how the law works.
The New York Times Pulls Out of Apple News
The current version of Apple News launched in 2019 as a dual free and paid service. The free version allows users to look at a selection of news headlines, where the subscription based Apple News+ service gave users access to a library of content from participating retailers. Exact terms were not disclosed but it is believed that Apple paid news organisations a fee for access to their paid content in Apple News+.
The New York Times announced that they are pulling their content from Apple News, stating that the Apple News+ model does not give the company direct access to subscribers like it would if they subscribed directly to The New York Times. This leads me to believe that means customer information and data. The New York Times obviously has detailed information about every user who subscribes to them directly, but does not get that data through users who are subscribed to Apple News+.
It will be interesting to see if The New York Times are an outlier, or the start of a trend. News organisations, especially those originally based around newspapers, have been struggling for years attempting to find ways to monetise their news offerings on the internet. This is the latest in pendulum swings back and forth on how users pay for content.
Former Intel Engineer Blames Skylake Processors for Apple’s Move Away From Intel
Interesting read of a story from a former Intel Engineer who believes that Apple decided to move away from Intel after issues with the launch of the 6th generation “Skylake” processors in 2015. I personally believe Apple was already working on this, and that it was always in the long term plans, but the Skylake processors most likely accelerated and cemented those plans. The Skylake processors had several power management issues that caused issues with computers in sleep mode, among other things.